A Review of VSCO
“The standard of Mobile Photography, the premier way to shoot, edit and share photos”
Note: I did this as a project while applying for jobs a few months ago
VSCO (Visual Supply Company) is an tool that I use to edit my photos before I put them up on Instagram, since I like their filters and the control that they offer better than Instagram’s often saturated and unsubtle filters. VSCO is actually much more than that, including extremely difficult for a new user to learn. I had installed it once, given up trying to use it, and then rediscovered it months later and began to use it regularly there on out for reasons I’ll explain below.
Despite clear design faults, they have 10 million downloads on Android devices alone, and an enthusiastic, loyal user base that spans across different forms of social media. In this piece I want to talk about what’s wrong, what’s right, and why.
Features of VSCO
- Camera
- Editing tools — filters, correction, crop, alignment etc.
- VSCO Journal — publish the photos taken and edited on the app
- VSCO Grid — platform within the app that showcases photos curated by the VSCO team.
- Collection — Save images from the Grid
To be honest, I don’t use either the Grid or the Journal because I have a follower base on Instagram, to which VSCO allows me to publish easily. VSCO itself, though minimal in design and approach as well as beautifully chic, is absolute chaos to try and figure out.
The images that I include in this piece will not tie up with how the user’s mental model at all and it’ll look like I picked bad representative images but it’s not me.
Pain points
Note: These are usability issues that I’ve found while using the app, strengthened by the writing of others. I did not conduct my own research in this case.
- Onboarding experience or What do I do?
Or, the lack of one. When you first open the app, you’re presented with the open menu. According to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for iOS, an app should strive to be well designed enough to not require a walkthrough or any sort of help — through basic exploration, the user should be able to figure it how to perform basic functions on the app, with some kind of feedback or rewards mechanism indicating that they’re doing the right thing. VSCO doesn’t have a walkthrough, or anything that gives users impetus to go through the Hook loop, the potent process of trigger, action, feedback, and investment, that leads to habit formation.
2. Navigation or Where do I go to do what I came here to do?
According to a guerrilla usability test conducted by Scott Hutter, users kept pressing the wrong buttons because there were so many options to choose from, and the button’s functions were never apparent because the icons are so ambiguous you can’t immediately tell what they mean.
It’s only by pressing each of these buttons to see where they went, again and again, is the user able to figure out what they do, and it’s unlikely that they’ll remember what the buttons mean later. This causes unnecessary cognitive burden on the user, which is one of the biggest pain points of VSCO in my opinion.
3. Diverging user flows or I didn’t mean to go there, how do I go back?
On several occasions in the aforementioned link, the user took steps back without meaning to, and it made them frustrated because they lost progress and would have to go through the whole process again without anything getting saved. And there is never a back button — the user needs to navigate from the menu every time. Also the menu button is a hamburger on the bottom left of the screen and literally no other app I’ve seen does that.
Having learned the VSCO much the same way as these individuals did, it’s amazing that people actually stuck through with the process as long as they did. I’ll talk about why exactly VSCO is sticky in a wonderful way a little later.
In short, these are a few of the design issues that VSCO has:
- Lack of walkthrough/clear instructions for a first time user
- Non-linear flow
- Inconsistent iconography
- No clear indication of state
- Little to no visual hierarchy
- Difficult navigation
- Lack of feedback after performing an action
- Product is feature rich but not designed to let people use it easily
Frustrations that users have when using it:
- Doesn’t cater to usability heuristics so that users need to basically reconsider everything they knew about how to use an app just for this; goes against user learning, is not intuitive at all
- Loss of progress for no apparent reason
- Confusion due to non-standard icon usage
- Cognitive burden
- Uncertainty over what just happened following their last button press
These are actionable insights that require just a little correction to make a significant change. Suggested changes
- Modify icons — The HIG dictate that if default icons can be used, they ought to be. Slight modifications on their current icons would improve usability a whole lot.
- Use standard locations for their icons. For example, slider menu icon can go to the top left. It doesn’t have to sacrifice aesthetic.
- Have the page transitions correspond to how the app would behave if it was actually a bunch of physical paper pages. That helps the user visualise flow so much.
- Always use a state indicator! It’s so easy to get lost on the app because you don’t remember how you got to where you are. It can be done beautifully too.
- Place all important navigation in the slider menu — they place huge importance on the Grid in the product messaging but you can’t even get there directly from the menu.
- Rethink information hierarchy entirely to make it conform because innovation for the sake of it isn’t always a good thing.
What makes VSCO such a great tool
I’ve given a fairly detailed account of what I find wrong about VSCO, and re-reading it myself, I’d struggle to find what made this app successful. But it is, and a lot of it has to do with the sheer quality of VSCO’s offering, which is more emotional, psychological and community-driven, than a result of great design.
VSCO takes less than perfect images, and by distorting them just right, pulls them away from what we consider to be a ‘perfect’ image to one with obvious imperfections that become part of the art, along with embracing less mainstream subject matter. VSCO’s positioning on the market in this regard was key to doing this.
They never wanted to compete with Instagram. According to an interview “the founders of VSCO had no intention of dipping into a get-rich-quick scheme. They were doing quite nicely nurturing a little startup peddling digital editing tools to the likes of professional photographers and graphic designers.” By never faltering from the needs of their primary target audience, they built a great tool that people valued even though it was so hard to navigate. They were delighted.
By showcasing content that catered to a certain aesthetic that was inherently beautiful, easily achievable, and yet different from the mainstream — washed out, crushed blacks, deliberate grain, subtle coloring — the user could transform their imperfect image to one that was widely acceptable by an ‘artistic’ community, which is still at the heart of VSCO’s mission. People who weren’t professional photographers or graphic designers, who didn’t have high end tools to capture perfectly clear images, found that VSCO gave them acceptance into a community that they were previously looking into from the outside. They were satisfied.
A lot of VSCO users talk about the merits of VSCO as an editing tool over what Instagram has become. Although Instagram rules by the numbers, users who prioritise focus on the image quality and artistry itself rather than the social aspect of it all have moved to using VSCO and haven’t looked back. They place value in a community that isn’t a popularity contest, where images that are put up on a pedestal are curated by the VSCO team and not by the masses. Images on the Grid display no likes, comments, and no follower count — just raw talent! In the age of relentless self promotion, it’s seen as a breath of fresh air.
That’s not to say people stay on the Grid, never to leave. The community is highly active on Instagram, with the hashtags #vsco and #vscocam together being used over 231 million times to date. VSCO publishes content and stories on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr about the artists and images that make it to the Grid. In personal experience, tagging a photo with #vsco — related hashtags increases the number of likes it gets by 75–100%, and encourages me check those tags out and return the love.
Tl;dr, This is what VSCO is doing right (Includes points I haven’t talked about above)
- Unwavering attention to the needs and tastes of their core audience
- Powerful editing tools with breadth and depth
- Content curation by a respected team
- Community building and nurturing tools focused again on their core audience
- Enables users who fall outside their core group to conform, without casting their net too wide
- Allows sharing to other channels without a doubt as to their origin ie, there are images so markedly VSCO quality that you can pick them out even if you see them on Facebook.
Positive reactions that users have when they use it:
- Pleasure at viewing images that are aesthetically appealing, and an interface that is clean, black & white, and minimal
- Delight at seeing their images being transformed beyond their expectations ( because it’s truly a magical tool and I don’t know how preset filters work but people love VSCO’s filters)
- Validation, when their work is featured on the Grid or on another platform.
- Sustained interest due to constantly updated stream of curated material which means that logging in every time provides a slightly different experience, which is exciting
- A sense of belonging to an exclusive community, which is a rush catering to mankind’s basic social instinct, but this time not overloaded by likes or comments but something seen as more organic or tasteful.
It still remains that the users have to mess up a lot before they can get the app to do what they want. What made me pick it up again was a friend’s Instagram — his photos had a quality that I wanted, and he told me that it was because he edited his photos on VSCO and it simply couldn’t be done that way on Instagram. After fumbling through VSCO’s interface and nearly giving up out of frustration at how unwieldy it was, I began to see the value. Using VSCO to edit my photos before putting them up on Instagram and tagging them #vscocam was a habit that I formed as a result of the validation and satisfaction I received from the end result — the impetus was entirely unrelated to and unmitigated by the app’s design. But when I got through it once, I was hooked.
And that’s my takeaway from this exercise, I think. There’s definitely a way to make it easier to use without compromising on how pretty the app is to look at it, or what it offers, which will make it even more attractive and popular. I’m sure they’ll do just that in later releases.
End notes:
There’s a lot that I haven’t gone into — written messaging, the details of the UX shortcomings and the exact mistakes that users make, and the specifics of how to improve the app, but there was a lot to go through. If you’d like me to expand on or clarify anything, please do let me know.
This is for an older version of VSCO — A review of their newer login flow coming up!
